How to win at football — form a London team

Thank God our World Cup is over. Now let's enjoy a sport, not a real-time video game. Cricket knows how to score a contest, as do tennis and rugby, tallying points with the flow of play.

When their matches are over, players smile and shake hands. They do not plunge into a ludicrous orgy of national self-loathing, fuelled by an often justified sense of unfairness. Proper, progressive sports change their rules when matches become tedious. Soccer does nothing but preen itself for being rich. It is fanatically conservative.

For a start, soccer pretends Britain is not one country. In which case, London should enter the next World Cup on its own. If Northern Ireland is a football nation along with Singapore, Liechtenstein, the Faroe Islands and many other doubtfully substantive states, why not London?

The Football Association (hence "soccer") argues that places such as the United Kingdom are not necessarily single nations, so they can field four "national" teams. From the 16th century until recently, Wales was one with England.

If the UK can choose to break itself into four, why not five? London is a global city state. It is a world tax haven, with a mayor, an army (the police riot squad) and a very big wheel. More to the point, if it fielded a World Cup team it might win. Imagine the might of Chelsea, Arsenal, Spurs and West Ham combined. If London entered, while foreign players might wish to play for their home teams, its qualification rules could be based on choice, citizenship and residence. Many more stars would be available — and swear privately in Spanish.

The Mayor could then take the lead in reforming the idiocies of the game. The root trouble with soccer is low scoring. This may be prized by the old guard as ensuring that results are in part due to luck, enabling weak teams to hold strong ones to a draw, thus sustaining tension throughout the game.

Yet there is intense unfairness in any game in which the result turns on a tiny handful of scoring chances, and in which whimsical refereeing leads to crucial decisions being fiercely contested. It is typical of soccer that its ruling body remains in total denial of the existence of television replays. The sport is like the Olympics, still hurling weapons last used at the Battle of Marathon.

Soccer scores depend on the width and height of the goals. These dimensions were fixed in 1863 in a pub in Holborn. Those present, so it is said, asked the landlord's son to see how high he could jump to bring off a "save". He touched the ceiling. Average English males have grown four or five inches since then but nobody has thought to change the size of the goals.

If they were fixed by the height a man could jump from standing, surely they should change when that height increases. Why else has the number of goals scored in the first 16 games of the World Cup fallen from 78 in 1954 to 46 in 2002 and 25 this year?

If the goals were five inches wider and every ball that now hits the woodwork went in, scores would double or treble. This would reflect the flow of play more accurately than the absurdities of 1-0 or 1-1. It would certainly reduce the hysteria surrounding each goal, each goalmouth incident, the significance of penalties and results decided by a fallible referee.

Rugby is a violent game which thus has to be open-minded about its rules. It constantly changes them and may soon do something about the endless kicking back and forth. Cricket has transformed batting technique for the better with limited-over games. Yet nobody is doing anything about the moronic kicking back and forth of soccer.

This makes it fun to play but reduces crowds to a frenzy of frustration, and clubs to wild spending on any player reputedly able to shoot on target. There is nothing wrong in principle with archaic rules. Tennis still scores itself by the face of a broken Victorian clock, yet it has the most exciting scoring system of any sport. It is the successor to boxing as the ideal single-combat sport. Cricket still measures its pitch in "chains" dating from the 18th century, despite bowlers being incomparably faster, but at least Twenty20 has enlivened matches.

Only soccer is stuck in the past, deriving its appeal not from the content of its contests but from the tribal hysteria that surrounds the unpredictability of its results. It is a game of competing machismos, baffling to most sensible women. Not surprisingly, Americans just cannot grasp such commentaries as "This one-nil lead looks impregnable", let alone the recent "American beats England one- all."

As a result, American reformers have discussed widening the goals, only to be slapped down by the sport's international reactionaries. Fifa should at least consider the change for the early stages of the World Cup, now of crippling tedium. If London had its own team under the Mayor's sponsorship it could join this admirable lobby.But there is not much hope. When I suggested such a change to my soccer-mad nine-year-old nephew, his face took on the appearance of a Tory matron asked about free handouts to immigrants. He was aghast. "You can't change the rules," he cried. When I pointed out that Parliament changes rules all the time, he was no less appalled. "But they are the rules of soccer."

So be it. But stop complaining when England fields a national B-team, when a crucial goal is disallowed and when the scoreline is decided by the referee. Widen the goals, I say, and let London win the World Cup.